UK:Hackers strike back to support WikiLeaks

Visa’s website now appears inaccessible following a large-scale attack on MasterCard earlier in the day.

Supporters of WikiLeaks in a loosely tied internet group called Operation Payback are claiming responsibility on their Twitter feed and elsewhere.

As of Wednesday afternoon, MasterCard’s site was back up.

Both companies stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks on Tuesday.

Visa had no immediate comment.

WikiLeaks supporters are striking back at perceived enemies of the site and its jailed founder Julian Assange, launching attacks against Visa, Mastercard and Swedish prosecutors among others.

Earlier, internet hacktivists operating under the label “Operation Payback" claimed responsibility in a Twitter message for causing technological problems at MasterCard, which pulled the plug on its relationship with WikiLeaks on Tuesday.

MasterCard said it was “experiencing heavy traffic", but spokesman James Issokson told The Associated Press the company would not confirm whether WikiLeaks was involved. Issokson said MasterCard was trying to restore service on Wednesday, but was not sure how long that would take. The website’s technical problems have no impact on consumers using credit cards for secure transactions, he added.

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MasterCard is the latest in a string of US-based internet companies - including Visa, Amazon.com, PayPal Inc and EveryDNS - to cut ties to WikiLeaks in recent days amid intense US government pressure.

The online attacks are part of a wave of support for WikiLeaks that is sweeping the internet. Twitter was choked with messages of solidarity on Wednesday for the group, while the site’s Facebook page hit a million fans.

Offline, the organisation is under pressure on many fronts. Assange, who turned himself in to London police on Tuesday, is now in a British prison fighting extradition to Sweden over a sex crimes case. Moves by Swiss Postfinance, MasterCard, PayPal and others, meanwhile, have impaired the secret-spilling group’s ability to raise money.

The pro-WikiLeaks vengeance campaign appeared to be taking the form of denial of service attacks in which computers across the internet are harnessed - sometimes surreptitiously - to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data, knocking them out of commission.

PayPal’s vice president of platform, Osama Bedier, said the company froze WikiLeaks’ account after receiving a letter from the US State Department “saying that the WikiLeaks activities were deemed illegal in the United States".

“It’s honestly just pretty straightforward from our perspective," he said, speaking at a web conference in Paris. A video of his comments was posted on Wednesday on the TechCrunch website.

Neither WikiLeaks nor Assange has been charged with any offence in the US, but the government is investigating whether Assange can be prosecuted for espionage or other offences.

Per Hellqvist, a security specialist with the firm Symantec, said a loose network of web activists called Anonymous appeared to be behind many of the attacks. The group, which has previously focused on the Church of Scientology and the music industry, has promised to come to Assange’s aid by knocking offline websites seen as hostile to WikiLeaks.

“While we don’t have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons," the group said in a statement on its website. “We want transparency and we counter censorship ... This is why we intend to utilise our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy."

The website for Swedish lawyer Claes Borgstrom, who represents the two women at the centre of Assange’s sex crimes case, was unreachable on Wednesday.

The Swiss postal system’s financial arm, Postfinance, which shut down Assange’s new bank account on Monday, was also having trouble. Spokesman Alex Josty said the website buckled under a barrage of traffic Tuesday but the onslaught seemed to have eased.

“Yesterday it was very, very difficult, then things improved overnight," he told the AP. “But it’s still not entirely back to normal."

Ironically, microblogging site Twitter - home of much WikiLeaks support - could become the next target. Operation Payback posted an online statement claiming: “Twitter you’re next for censoring Wikileaks discussion."

Some WikiLeaks supporters accuse Twitter of preventing the term “WikiLeaks" from appearing as one of its popular “trending topics". Twitter denies censorship, saying the topics are determined by an algorithm.

Meanwhile, the French government’s effort to stop a company there from hosting WikiLeaks has failed - at least for now.

The web services company OVH, which says a client has rented an OVH server that now hosts the wikileaks.ch website, sought a ruling by two courts about the legality of hosting WikiLeaks in France. The judges said they couldn’t decide on the highly technical case right away.

WikiLeaks angered the US government earlier this year when it posted a war video taken by Army helicopters showing troops gunning down two unarmed Reuters journalists. Since then, the organisation has leaked some 400,000 classified US war files from Iraq and 76,000 from Afghanistan that US military officials say included names of US informants and other information that could put people’s lives at risk.

The latest leaks involve private US diplomatic cables that included frank US assessments of foreign nations and their leaders.

Those cables have had serious repercussions for the United States, embarrassing allies, angering rivals, and reopening old wounds across the world. State and Defense department officials say foreign powers have been pulling back from their dealings with the US government since the documents hit the internet.